Senate votes to upend centerpiece of Obama climate pledge

The Senate on Tuesday approved a pair of resolutions aimed at killing the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's climate agenda, part of a Republican-led effort to undercut the White House goal of striking a new global-warming deal in Paris next month.

The Senate voted to greenlight two disapproval resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, a seldom-invoked law that allows lawmakers to reject a recently finalized regulation with a simply majority vote. One resolution targeted the Environmental Protection Agency's climate rule for existing power plants, and a second focused on EPA's climate rule for new and modified power plants. Both passed 52-46, largely along party lines.

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But the resolutions will not succeed in overturning the EPA regulations. Obama will smack the measures down with vetoes, and lawmakers do not have enough support to override him.

Republicans have been plotting for months to complicate the Obama administration's push for a deal in Paris.

"I think [diplomats] will take a message away from this vote," said Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who introduced the first resolution. "The general support for the direction he’s going is weak at best."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who sponsored the other resolution, focused his attack on the domestic effects of the EPA rules, particularly in his coal-dependent home state.

“Just like with its decision on Keystone last month, the Obama administration is putting facts and compassion to the side in order to advance their ideological agenda,” McConnell said on the Senate floor earlier Tuesday, referring to rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. “Higher energy bills and lost jobs may be a mere trifle to some on the left, but it’s a different story for millions of middle-class Americans in Kentucky and across our country.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid defended the president’s climate regulations. “It is the right thing to do, and the president will protect this because it’s the right thing for the health of America,” he said.

Democrats also said the Senate's time would be better spent devising a response to the attacks that rocked the French capital last week. In a floor speech, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) called climate change a "catalyst of conflict" that exacerbates tensions that fuel terrorism and wars.

"Paris is still recovering from the terrorist attacks ... and the majority leader wants to spend floor time serving the coal industry and trying to undue the president's Clean Power Plan," Whitehouse said at a news conference earlier Tuesday.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a leading EPA critic who doubts mainstream climate science, blasted Democrats who say climate change is a national security issue.

“So when you have a Russian airliner bombed out of the air, when you have the number of killings, deaths, the carnage in Paris, it is time for the president to move away from his focus on climate, which to me appears like a trivial pursuit," Barrasso said Tuesday. "The president ought to be focused not on the upcoming Paris climate talks two weeks from now but on the impacts that are happening and happened in Paris last week."

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is expected to approve a similar set of resolutions this week, and the full chamber will follow suit as soon as Nov. 30, the first day of the Paris climate-change summit. “That’s probably the best opportunity ... to make it clear what our position is in terms of this international conversation,” said Matt Sparks, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Republicans are hoping the votes will send a message to diplomats gathering in Paris for two weeks of negotiations that a majority of Congress is not behind the president's agenda. They also want to underscore the likelihood that a Republican president would abandon the president's focus on climate change.

The resolutions won the support of three moderate coal-state Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.). Green groups including the Sierra Club and Environment America had mounted advertising campaigns in recent weeks aimed at keeping other moderate Democrats on board, including Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Robert Casey (Pa.), Mark Warner (Va.), Michael Bennet (Colo.) and Donnelly.

Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Mark Kirk (Ill.) and Susan Collins (Maine) voted against the CRA resolutions. Ayotte is facing one of the toughest reelection races next year and became the first national Republican to embrace the Clean Power Plan earlier this year. Kirk, who has faced green pressure in his tough reelection race, had said the EPA rules would harm coal workers in his home state, but he sided with the administration in the end. Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), both of whom are running for president, did not vote on the resolutions.

"Senator Kirk has championed the ban on sewage dumping in the Great Lakes and today voted to improve air quality and reduce rising childhood asthma rates," a Kirk spokeswoman said in a statement explaining the senator's vote. "With our diverse energy portfolio, Illinois is already leading the way in energy efficiency and is well positioned to balance the the needs of the environment and the economy."

The votes show Republicans remain well short of the 60 votes they would need to block EPA's rules with spending bill riders, which they have vowed to pursue. And the equal number of defections on either side of the aisle dampen their argument that there is widespread bipartisan opposition to the rules. GOP senators say they will continue to push for environmental policy riders in an omnibus spending bill Congress will have to pass to avoid a government shutdown by Dec. 11, the same day the Paris climate talks are scheduled to end.

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a member of the Appropriations Committee, acknowledged it would be tough to upend the climate rule, but he said Republicans could use that as leverage to block EPA's Waters of the United States rule, which has less support in the Senate.

“The Clean Power Plan is going to be tougher to get both because I think there’ll be more Democratic pushback than on WOTUS and I think the White House obviously is going to fight harder on it as well," Hoeven said Tuesday. "So we may be stuck on the Clean Power Plan … until we get a different administration.”

Democrats said the resolutions will not weaken Obama's leverage in Paris.

“I don’t see it as a legitimate concern,” Whitehouse said. U.S. officials in Paris “will be able to explain that under our rules the president will veto this, obviously. … We will sustain the veto, and this whole exercise is an exercise in futility.”

Many diplomats say they won't be distracted by Republicans' antics. Asked about the Republican attacks by reporters at a recent news conference, the United Nations' top climate-change official, Christiana Figueres, shrugged and said, "Yeah, fine."

Indeed, there is growing momentum toward reaching a deal in Paris that encourages every country to take domestic measures to tackle climate change and establishes a mechanism to increase ambition over time. While the agreement on its own won't do enough to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, diplomats hope it will lay the foundation for a decades-long transition off fossil fuels.

Obama has made clinching the climate deal a top second-term priority and a cornerstone of his environmental legacy. White House officials have said that Obama will oppose any attempt to undercut his climate agenda.

“We will not back down," White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said earlier this year, adding later, “We’ll veto ideological riders to stop this plan or undercut our bedrock environmental laws."